Thanks for the shared enthusiasm, jrista. My spirits aren't easily dampened. I do like to make the best informed decisions and that means sifting through some threads with misinformation and using discretion. It is usually possible to discern who really knows what they are talking about. Of course there are always differing opinions and that's fine.

Somehow I can't believe I could handle the 600 F4 handheld for more than a few seconds. On the other hand the 300 is very manageable and that's important to me since I like to hike through the bush and have maximum mobility.

At any rate I'm understanding better why so many folk are waiting for the 7D upgrade. Do you think trying my friends 70D with my 300 would represent something close to what I'll likely get with the 7D2? That seems to be a pretty impressive camera.

Thanks for the shared enthusiasm, jrista. My spirits aren't easily dampened. I do like to make the best informed decisions and that means sifting through some threads with misinformation and using discretion. It is usually possible to discern who really knows what they are talking about. Of course there are always differing opinions and that's fine.

Somehow I can't believe I could handle the 600 F4 handheld for more than a few seconds. On the other hand the 300 is very manageable and that's important to me since I like to hike through the bush and have maximum mobility.

At any rate I'm understanding better why so many folk are waiting for the 7D upgrade. Do you think trying my friends 70D with my 300 would represent something close to what I'll likely get with the 7D2? That seems to be a pretty impressive camera.

Jack

Using the 70D will give you an idea of what it is like to work with a crop factor, and the current 19pt AF system. The pixel density is ok, 18mp, but the key thing is the 1.6x crop factor (which affects your FoV, and is a part of the added "reach"). You will most likely notice the drop in IQ...that old 18mp sensor is WAY past its age, and desperately needs to be replaced. It isn't anywhere as good as the 6D sensor.

You should also get a feel for the higher frame rate. That is one of the key areas that is improved, and it is really nice having a high burst rate. I don't know what the 70D buffer depth is, however on the 7D, I currently get ~35 frames before slowdown, which is another huge boon (especially for BIF).

So, anyway, yeah give the 70D a try. It'll give you an idea about a few things. The 7D II should really have a major boost to IQ, so you wont' get an idea about that, but the crop factor and frame rate will probably come as a bit of a surprise.

As a side note, since it would take an increase to 82% Q.E. for the 7D II to gain a true ONE stop improvement in high ISO performance, we can never hope to see a true two stop improvement. The 7D II, nor any successor, nor any new pro-grade APS-C line of cameras from Canon or anyone else, will ever perform as well as a FF sensor that has larger pixels. So long as the average pixel size for FF sensors remains larger than the average pixel size for APS-C sensors, FF sensors will always perform better at high ISO. Nothing we can do about that...its just physics.

Well, there are a few tricks that Canon could do. For example, if a camera used a series of fast exposures, the camera could do motion vector analysis on various parts of the image, then add them programmatically after compensating for camera and subject motion, resulting in roughly the same image as you'd get with the shorter shot length (blur-wise), but with the SNR of the longer shot length. However, that's way beyond the realm of sensor tech.

How would that work with a selectable shutter speed, though? I mean, if I as the photographer chose a 1/1250s shutter speed, a single exposure that long is going to be better than multiple separate exposures blended together. You'll lose light in the interframe time as well, so gain would have to be higher...

You're assuming a mechanical shutter. Consider a vertically stacked sensor that can push its value down to a buffer deeper in the silicon or, for simplicity, an interline transfer design. You can then sample the image with no rolling shutter (bette for video) and no delay between shots. If a mechanical shutter is desirable for some reason, open it before the first frame and close it at the end.

As a side note, since it would take an increase to 82% Q.E. for the 7D II to gain a true ONE stop improvement in high ISO performance, we can never hope to see a true two stop improvement. The 7D II, nor any successor, nor any new pro-grade APS-C line of cameras from Canon or anyone else, will ever perform as well as a FF sensor that has larger pixels. So long as the average pixel size for FF sensors remains larger than the average pixel size for APS-C sensors, FF sensors will always perform better at high ISO. Nothing we can do about that...its just physics.

Well, there are a few tricks that Canon could do. For example, if a camera used a series of fast exposures, the camera could do motion vector analysis on various parts of the image, then add them programmatically after compensating for camera and subject motion, resulting in roughly the same image as you'd get with the shorter shot length (blur-wise), but with the SNR of the longer shot length. However, that's way beyond the realm of sensor tech.

How would that work with a selectable shutter speed, though? I mean, if I as the photographer chose a 1/1250s shutter speed, a single exposure that long is going to be better than multiple separate exposures blended together. You'll lose light in the interframe time as well, so gain would have to be higher...

You're assuming a mechanical shutter. Consider a vertically stacked sensor that can push its value down to a buffer deeper in the silicon or, for simplicity, an interline transfer design. You can then sample the image with no rolling shutter (bette for video) and no delay between shots. If a mechanical shutter is desirable for some reason, open it before the first frame and close it at the end.

It matters not whether the shutter is mechanical or electronic. What matters is that the PHOTOGRAPHER selects the EXPOSURE TIME (shutter speed). Shutter speed is shutter speed, regardless of whether the shutter is mechanical or electronic. If the photographer chooses a 1/2000th shutter speed, then that is AS LONG AS the camera can expose. Trying to make a better exposure by taking several short exposures within that 1/2000th window is likely impossible. At the very least, there is going to be some lag time for read or "ship the charge off to a buffer" between each partial exposure. That lag time is going to cost you light. Because shutter speed is a user selectable quantity of time, gathering light for that total time is the best we can do.

As a side note, since it would take an increase to 82% Q.E. for the 7D II to gain a true ONE stop improvement in high ISO performance, we can never hope to see a true two stop improvement. The 7D II, nor any successor, nor any new pro-grade APS-C line of cameras from Canon or anyone else, will ever perform as well as a FF sensor that has larger pixels. So long as the average pixel size for FF sensors remains larger than the average pixel size for APS-C sensors, FF sensors will always perform better at high ISO. Nothing we can do about that...its just physics.

Well, there are a few tricks that Canon could do. For example, if a camera used a series of fast exposures, the camera could do motion vector analysis on various parts of the image, then add them programmatically after compensating for camera and subject motion, resulting in roughly the same image as you'd get with the shorter shot length (blur-wise), but with the SNR of the longer shot length. However, that's way beyond the realm of sensor tech.

How would that work with a selectable shutter speed, though? I mean, if I as the photographer chose a 1/1250s shutter speed, a single exposure that long is going to be better than multiple separate exposures blended together. You'll lose light in the interframe time as well, so gain would have to be higher...

You're assuming a mechanical shutter. Consider a vertically stacked sensor that can push its value down to a buffer deeper in the silicon or, for simplicity, an interline transfer design. You can then sample the image with no rolling shutter (bette for video) and no delay between shots. If a mechanical shutter is desirable for some reason, open it before the first frame and close it at the end.

It matters not whether the shutter is mechanical or electronic. What matters is that the PHOTOGRAPHER selects the EXPOSURE TIME (shutter speed). Shutter speed is shutter speed, regardless of whether the shutter is mechanical or electronic. If the photographer chooses a 1/2000th shutter speed, then that is AS LONG AS the camera can expose. Trying to make a better exposure by taking several short exposures within that 1/2000th window is likely impossible. At the very least, there is going to be some lag time for read or "ship the charge off to a buffer" between each partial exposure. That lag time is going to cost you light. Because shutter speed is a user selectable quantity of time, gathering light for that total time is the best we can do.

Other way around. The user typically chooses an exposure time with the primary goal of avoiding blur from camera or subject motion. If the user allows the camera to do so, however, the camera could use a much longer exposure than what the user selected, dicing that long exposure up into pieces of the user-specified length, and compensating for motion to approximate an exposure of the user-chosen duration while gaining increased accuracy in portions of the image that did not change significantly or exhibited only trivial transformation, such as shifting one way or the other, similar to the way MPEG compression reduces data rate by describing portions of one frame in terms of adjacent frames.

BTW, with an electronic shutter, there should be very little (if any) gap between frames. Some CCDs with electronic shutters can dump hundreds or even thousands of frames per second, which means that the gap can't be much more than single-digit or perhaps double-digit microseconds, either of which would almost certainly be completely ignorable.

As far as I can tell, the hard part is not the sensor side; it's being able to dump ten times as many RAW-sized images to the flash card so that such post-processing would even be possible. It's almost certainly infeasible right now, but I'd expect it to be pretty easy to do in just a few years. It could be substantially longer before cameras would have fast enough CPUs to do that sort of processing internally, of course. Alternatively, it might be possible sooner with the use of some sort of perverse RAW-MPEG encoding in which each subsequent frame in the set is described relative to the first, but the compute power required would be... considerable.

As an added bonus, with an electronic shutter, the camera could examine a few shots before and after the moment when the user presses the shutter like an iPhone does, choosing the least smeared, and defaulting to using that one as the base frame for correction purposes. Whether shots taken before the lens fully focuses are useful or not is a different question, but I figure that by the time we see something like I'm describing, we'll probably also have light-field sensors that will make those shots almost usable.... Or not. Hard to say.

As a side note, since it would take an increase to 82% Q.E. for the 7D II to gain a true ONE stop improvement in high ISO performance, we can never hope to see a true two stop improvement. The 7D II, nor any successor, nor any new pro-grade APS-C line of cameras from Canon or anyone else, will ever perform as well as a FF sensor that has larger pixels. So long as the average pixel size for FF sensors remains larger than the average pixel size for APS-C sensors, FF sensors will always perform better at high ISO. Nothing we can do about that...its just physics.

Well, there are a few tricks that Canon could do. For example, if a camera used a series of fast exposures, the camera could do motion vector analysis on various parts of the image, then add them programmatically after compensating for camera and subject motion, resulting in roughly the same image as you'd get with the shorter shot length (blur-wise), but with the SNR of the longer shot length. However, that's way beyond the realm of sensor tech.

How would that work with a selectable shutter speed, though? I mean, if I as the photographer chose a 1/1250s shutter speed, a single exposure that long is going to be better than multiple separate exposures blended together. You'll lose light in the interframe time as well, so gain would have to be higher...

You're assuming a mechanical shutter. Consider a vertically stacked sensor that can push its value down to a buffer deeper in the silicon or, for simplicity, an interline transfer design. You can then sample the image with no rolling shutter (bette for video) and no delay between shots. If a mechanical shutter is desirable for some reason, open it before the first frame and close it at the end.

It matters not whether the shutter is mechanical or electronic. What matters is that the PHOTOGRAPHER selects the EXPOSURE TIME (shutter speed). Shutter speed is shutter speed, regardless of whether the shutter is mechanical or electronic. If the photographer chooses a 1/2000th shutter speed, then that is AS LONG AS the camera can expose. Trying to make a better exposure by taking several short exposures within that 1/2000th window is likely impossible. At the very least, there is going to be some lag time for read or "ship the charge off to a buffer" between each partial exposure. That lag time is going to cost you light. Because shutter speed is a user selectable quantity of time, gathering light for that total time is the best we can do.

Other way around. The user typically chooses an exposure time with the primary goal of avoiding blur from camera or subject motion. If the user allows the camera to do so, however, the camera could use a much longer exposure than what the user selected, dicing that long exposure up into pieces of the user-specified length, and compensating for motion to approximate an exposure of the user-chosen duration while gaining increased accuracy in portions of the image that did not change significantly or exhibited only trivial transformation, such as shifting one way or the other, similar to the way MPEG compression reduces data rate by describing portions of one frame in terms of adjacent frames.

BTW, with an electronic shutter, there should be very little (if any) gap between frames. Some CCDs with electronic shutters can dump hundreds or even thousands of frames per second, which means that the gap can't be much more than single-digit or perhaps double-digit microseconds, either of which would almost certainly be completely ignorable.

As far as I can tell, the hard part is not the sensor side; it's being able to dump ten times as many RAW-sized images to the flash card so that such post-processing would even be possible. It's almost certainly infeasible right now, but I'd expect it to be pretty easy to do in just a few years. It could be substantially longer before cameras would have fast enough CPUs to do that sort of processing internally, of course. Alternatively, it might be possible sooner with the use of some sort of perverse RAW-MPEG encoding in which each subsequent frame in the set is described relative to the first, but the compute power required would be... considerable.

As an added bonus, with an electronic shutter, the camera could examine a few shots before and after the moment when the user presses the shutter like an iPhone does, choosing the least smeared, and defaulting to using that one as the base frame for correction purposes. Whether shots taken before the lens fully focuses are useful or not is a different question, but I figure that by the time we see something like I'm describing, we'll probably also have light-field sensors that will make those shots almost usable.... Or not. Hard to say.

This sounds conceptually along the same lines as lytro...capture as much information in an exposure as possible, and deal with everything else in post. It is an interesting idea, but it is actually a fairly significant shift from how photographers thing about things now. I am not so sure how viable allowing the camera to control the actual exposure time really is.

In my case, I expect to know exactly how long the shutter is. It isn't just about compensating for or eliminating subject motion blur, it is more about compensating for camera shake (yes, even with IS or on a tripod.) If a photographer expects an exposure to be a known tiny fraction of a second, but the camera decides it will be a much larger fraction of a second, the likelihood of the camera user moving the camera themselves in a detrimentally significant way is very real. The camera, rather than the photographer, now determines how long the shutter is "open" (mechanical or electronic), rather than the photographer, and that is a hidden quantity...the photographer doesn't know, and assuming there was some kind of feedback mechanism to allow them to know, it is still a very different way of performing photography, and the chance for human error is very real and significant.

While the idea could, theoretically, allow for infinite dynamic range, I think it would require retraining photographers to think differently...and that is never an easy thing to do.

exposure time should remain completely under (stills) phtotographer's discrete control. It is much more tahn only a technical parameter to achieve "correct" exposure of a scene and/or images free from shake-induced blur and from motion-induced blur when moving subjects are in the scene.While for many images photographers will be happy with an exposurte time in a fairly wide range, there are many other situations, where we want to set a specific exposure time to achieve certain effects in the image .. from completely frozen motion t0 "dragging shutter" to consciously make motion blur show up. This would be defeated if the actual exposure was a composite of a series of "nano-sliced" exposure times selected at the camera algorithms' discretion. To me only acceptable in operating modes where exposure time is already currently set by program parameters/algorithms ... "green box", Av, P - but definitely not in Time Value ("Tv") or Manual ("M") mode.

I don't see why setting exposure time with single shot HDR is such a hard thing to grasp. If the camera just tells you the longest exposure of the group, and you already set how many shots per group and the difference in exposure per shot, everything is a known quantity.All we need is an "HDR" slot on the mode dial.

exposure time should remain completely under (stills) phtotographer's discrete control.

Oh, it would be, under what I was describing. You'd set your exposure time, and then in post, you could control which adjacent subframes get merged in and which ones don't (including using just the single subframe). When viewed in-camera, it could either make an educated guess or show you just the single subframe, depending on user preference.

exposure time should remain completely under (stills) phtotographer's discrete control.

Oh, it would be, under what I was describing. You'd set your exposure time, and then in post, you could control which adjacent subframes get merged in and which ones don't (including using just the single subframe). When viewed in-camera, it could either make an educated guess or show you just the single subframe, depending on user preference.

That means the results are entirely arbitrary. You aren't doing exposure at all, your simply ripping out a bunch of frames agnostic if an explicit exposure time. I think that is even conceptually more difficult for most photographers to grasp (not to mention MASSIVELY wasteful of space). Again, it could theoretically allow you to have infinite DR, but it would make photography very difficult, rather than very easy (and it's never been easier than it is today.)

Exposure control needs to be under photographer control. You can't arbitrarily take a photograph and then decide exposure in post...you could massively underexpose if a majority of the frames ended up "unusable" once you got it all onto a computer. This isn't an argument about an option for improving sensor sensitivity or dynamic range, it is a discussion about redesigning the entire way we do photography, which I think is out of context.

I don't see why setting exposure time with single shot HDR is such a hard thing to grasp. If the camera just tells you the longest exposure of the group, and you already set how many shots per group and the difference in exposure per shot, everything is a known quantity.All we need is an "HDR" slot on the mode dial.

We weren't originally talking about HDR. We were talking about sensor performance, and how to improve it (at a fundamental technical level, abstract of any actual specific use case.)

exposure time should remain completely under (stills) phtotographer's discrete control.

Oh, it would be, under what I was describing. You'd set your exposure time, and then in post, you could control which adjacent subframes get merged in and which ones don't (including using just the single subframe). When viewed in-camera, it could either make an educated guess or show you just the single subframe, depending on user preference.

That means the results are entirely arbitrary. You aren't doing exposure at all, your simply ripping out a bunch of frames agnostic if an explicit exposure time. I think that is even conceptually more difficult for most photographers to grasp (not to mention MASSIVELY wasteful of space). Again, it could theoretically allow you to have infinite DR, but it would make photography very difficult, rather than very easy (and it's never been easier than it is today.)

Exposure control needs to be under photographer control. You can't arbitrarily take a photograph and then decide exposure in post...you could massively underexpose if a majority of the frames ended up "unusable" once you got it all onto a computer. This isn't an argument about an option for improving sensor sensitivity or dynamic range, it is a discussion about redesigning the entire way we do photography, which I think is out of context.

Not really. I'm not talking about summing; I'm talking about averaging. The user experience would be exactly the same as it is now, at least on the camera side. If you asked such a camera for a 1/250th shot, it would take a 1/250th shot. It would just also silently take several more 1/250th shots, choose the least blurred, show you that one, and make the others available for future manipulation and processing that could further reduce noise by doing interframe correlation, motion compensation (motion of parts of the image, not just the image as a whole), and blending. You'd have to make pretty major changes to the processing workflow to take maximum advantage of such a feature, but it wouldn't fundamentally change photography by any stretch of the imagination.

I don't think you could do it the other way—using shorter exposures and summing them to get enough of a signal so that you could choose the exposure in post-processing—because that would significantly increase the effect of preamplifier noise coming off the sensor, barring some sort of supercooled hardware.

I don't see why setting exposure time with single shot HDR is such a hard thing to grasp. If the camera just tells you the longest exposure of the group, and you already set how many shots per group and the difference in exposure per shot, everything is a known quantity.All we need is an "HDR" slot on the mode dial.

We weren't originally talking about HDR. We were talking about sensor performance, and how to improve it (at a fundamental technical level, abstract of any actual specific use case.)

Actually, I basically was. The way most cameras approach HDR is almost precisely what I was describing; the only differences are in whether you change the exposure in subsequent shots and in the processing on the back end.

I only take HDR sequences as a measure of last resort and when use it, I want to have it all entirely under my direct control - at time of capture, not only in post, wading through dozens or hundreds of shots. I want to chose how many exposures and all parameters of these.

I don't want anything more along the lines of "all cameras being video cams and stills being just single frames extracted from the video stream". No, no, no.

I also don't like the approach taken e.g. in Nikon 1 where the thingie klicks off a number of shots before you even fully press the shutter button and then attempts to select "the best" capture.

Sometimes I just like it blurred. Even if my camera and its japanese engineers cannot understand why. :-)

I don't want anything more along the lines of "all cameras being video cams and stills being just single frames extracted from the video stream". No, no, no.

You're getting it wrong...I'm sure, when you use your 7D it isn't always shooting 7-8fps...If you have 24fps or higher... you just have more chances to capture the perfect moment.E.g. when a lion pounces on a wilder beast or when a eagle grabs a trout from a river, when Beckam bends it.

People that own a 14fps 1DX.... do you wish for higher?If so why?If not, why is 14fps perfect or why not settle for less?

I don't want anything more along the lines of "all cameras being video cams and stills being just single frames extracted from the video stream". No, no, no.

You're getting it wrong...I'm sure, when you use your 7D it isn't always shooting 7-8fps...If you have 24fps or higher... you just have more chances to capture the perfect moment.E.g. when a lion pounces on a wilder beast or when a eagle grabs a trout from a river, when Beckam bends it.

People that own a 14fps 1DX.... do you wish for higher?If so why?If not, why is 14fps perfect or why not settle for less?

I don't have, I would like to have as I see my bursts sometimes off by that fraction of a second for the while burst.

now when in video mode I think it is easier to capture that videoo is because of the less pixles we are working with. Try pumping out full fram pixels for 30 minutes at 60f/sec how many TB of storage are ya gong to need.

I see. Ignoring the limitations of current technology, rather than having all the photosites fill and read once after a set time, you could instead record many short exposures and combine them however you please in post to make the desired exposure. Theoretically it should be able to come to the exact same end result, just with the flexibility to trim or add exposure time and dynamic range.